Thank you for your tester team applications throughout September. We received upwards of 150 applications. As always, it's nice to see such a high level of interest from the community in joining the staff team. We discussed all the applications, and whittled the list down to a team of 12 new testers. As a reminder: we no longer use the "reserved tester" system and you need to apply each time recruitment opens to be re-discussed. You'll be able to see if you were selected for a role in our staff team below. Congratulations and welcome to those who made the cut!

Davis' Development Blog: I'd like to take the opportunity to mention Davis' dev blog again for those of you who aren't aware. Since he became a game developer, we've been mentioning what development projects he's working on in the blog. His latest post was yesterday, so take a look if you haven't already. We mentioned what we're including next revision, and also talked about potential burner phone and house robbery scripts which are a common mention by community members. It's a good thread to bookmark if you're interested. You can find it here.

Survey 2018: We'll be putting out another survey to gauge general community feedback over the next month. The survey will be simplified this year and simply be a request for feedback and ideas. We'll use it to pinpoint popular discussion topics or desired improvements/suggestions. If you're able, then please take the time to fill it out constructively. The more entries to the survey, the better. Keep an eye on the announcements.

Community Discussions: For discussions generated by the survey and in general, I'm interested in establishing a discussion area that encourages staff and players to hold conversations about what they'd like to see on the server, or simply topics they'd like to talk about. Whether you like it or not, General Discussions isn't always the most productive or constructive area for discussions, and is open to everybody — even ban evaders, trolls or those who haven't got anything useful to say. This "discussion area" would be public for everybody to read, but only a certain forum group would be able to post alongside the staff team. This would be a broad, easy-to-join group, but it would be one that we'd use to filter out the trolls, ban evaders and other people who just want to derail discussions and make unproductive posts on those types of threads. I'll post more about that when the idea comes to fruition, and you'll be able to join that group if you're interested in focused discussion.

Contact: My inbox is always open for queries and comments. If you want to strike up a conversation with me about something that concerns you, or want to flag my attention to a discussion that could use input or management's opinion, feel free to reach out to me and let me know. I try to respond to every message that I receive despite the amount that I get on a day-to-day basis. Forum PM is always the best way to get in touch with me and guarantee that I see your message. Please don't rely on IRC or Discord as a means of getting in touch with me.

I will move on to announce a batch of brand new testers, tester reinstatements and admin team promotions:

NEW TESTERS & TESTER REINSTATEMENTS:

Congratulations to the following people who will be welcomed into our staff team for the very first time:

And welcome back to the following testers who will be reinstating into the tester team:

Chef Lemon
Cloudy!
Jonesy
Matteo
Mikey_Rogers
Mood

Congratulations again, and I look forward to seeing you around the server and the forums! Please contact Bennemus to take the next step and be welcomed into the team. He is the point of contact for the Tester Team as your Head of Testers.